October 4, 2024
Clarence Tsui
The Maw Naing’s second fiction feature, ‘MA – Cry of Silence’, is a riveting cri du coeur about life under authoritarian rule in Myanmar, seen through the struggle of aggrieved factory workers against their abusive employers.
September 29, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Several generations of women are stalked by the same creepy family curse in Spanish director Pedro Martín-Calero’s stylish, prize-winning psycho-horror debut ‘The Wailing’.
September 26, 2024
Deborah Young
Mike Leigh returns from a lengthy excursion shooting period films to the kind of chamber piece he excels in, in ‘Hard Truths’, a small story about family dysfunction magnified into high drama by Mariane Jean-Baptiste’s formidable lead performance as a wife and mother going over the edge.
September 25, 2024
Lucy Virgen
Costa-Gavras, in top form at 91, starts another revolution, this time about death, with ‘Last Breath’.
September 25, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Un jockey campeón se embarca en un viaje surrealista de desafío de género en el disparejo pero elegante, colorido y divertido thriller cómico de Luis Ortega.
September 24, 2024
Deborah Young
The killing of a Mexican cartel boss puts his 4-year-old son in danger in a powerful, often mythic evocation of life lived on the edge of death, Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s engrossing drama ‘Sujo’.
September 24, 2024
Deborah Young
Cuando la despensa está vacía, una familia de clase media en un país latinoamericano sin nombre, primero pasa hambre y luego se vuelve salvaje en ‘Zafari’. La espeluznante fábula distópica de Mariana Rondón hará que los espectadores no quieran cenar.
September 24, 2024
Deborah Young
Un ensayo imaginativo y fascinante sobre el feminismo y la maternidad, ‘La virgen roja’ de Paula Ortiz presenta a una inolvidable Najwa Nimri como una madre infernal y dominante que ve a su brillante hija de 16 años como una escultura que ha creado para cambiar el mundo en la España de los años 30.
September 23, 2024
Patricia Boero
Una historia conmovedora y divertida sobre dos mujeres solitarias que se conectan a través de la división de clases, con la actuación excepcional de Paulina Garcia como una matrona rica y mandona que se desliza hacia la demencia.
September 23, 2024
Lucy Virgen
Veinticuatro años después de la primera denuncia por acoso sexual a un político en España, Iciar Bollaín cuenta la historia en Soy Nevenka con sensibilidad y urgencia. Sir Isaac Newton dijo que su perspectiva era mejor que la de sus antecesores porque estaba parado en hombros de gigantes. Las mujeres del movimiento #metoo, las que […]
September 22, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Acclaimed documentary director Joshua Oppenheimer makes his fiction feature debut with ‘The End’, an ungainly but wildly ambitious post-apocalypse musical co-starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay and Moses Ingram.
September 21, 2024
Deborah Young
Festival favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa remakes his own 1998 revenge thriller ‘The Serpent’s Path’ as a tasteful psychological horror film set in France, whose top-notch, mixed Franco-Japanese cast makes it worth watching.
September 20, 2024
Lucy Virgen
One of the most prominent Latin American film industries is under the chainsaw.
September 20, 2024
Lucy Virgen
Vibrant flamenco music redeems a weak narrative in Antón Alvarez’s directorial debut.
September 19, 2024
Max Borg
Australian stop-motion master Adam Elliot is back with his touching, humane second feature ‘Memoir of a Snail’, featuring the voice of Sarah Snook.
September 13, 2024
Kevin Jagernauth
2024 awards race takes shape as TIFF brings stars and prestige to the red carpet.
September 9, 2024
TFV Staff
The long, hot summer seemed reluctant to end as crowds returned to the Lido to see the stars and the Venice film selection.
September 9, 2024
Deborah Young
The birth of Italian porn films in the 1980’s is told as a sentimental, gently humorous biopic about porn entrepreneur Riccardo Schicchi in ‘Diva Futura’, a well-written romp made to cash in on its airbrushed sketches of adult film stars Moana Pozzi, Cicciolina and Eva Henger.
September 7, 2024
Deborah Young
Taiwan-born and New York-based producer Alex C. Lo seems to be everywhere on the A-list festival circuit.
September 6, 2024
Stephen Dalton
A kidnap thriller rooted in surveillance, voyeurism and the unkindness of strangers, Yeo Siew Hua’s third feature ‘Stranger Eyes’ is the first ever Singaporean film to compete for the Golden Lion in Venice
September 5, 2024
Deborah Young
Choosing a narrative style as austere and unforgiving as her OB-GYN heroine, rising Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili (‘Beginning’) plumbs the depths of female suffering and self-sacrifice in ‘April’, a festival film which, like its protag, is destined to be admired more than loved.
September 2, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature ‘The Room Next Door’ is a minor-key but quietly profound meditation on love and death, pain and glory.
September 2, 2024
Clarence Tsui
A retired military sniper tries to atone for his murderous past in ‘Phantosmia’, Philippine auteur Lav Diaz’s poetic, reflective, modest yet visually captivating study of guilt and redemption.
September 1, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Ageing bad-boy auteur Harmony Korine’s latest experimental art-punk feature ‘Baby Invasion’ is a visually impressive but ultimately hollow exercise in jaded hipster nihilism.
August 31, 2024
Deborah Young
Three doctors of different political views struggle to treat soldiers returning from the front during WWI and combat a new menace, the Spanish flu, in director Gianni Amelio’s grimly shocking film about war’s after-effects, ‘Battleground’.
August 31, 2024
Stephen Dalton
French writer-director duo Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma go back to the 1990s with their operatic but flawed coming-of-age saga ‘And Their Children After Them’, adapted from a prize-winning novel.
August 30, 2024
Stephen Dalton
A horse racing champion embarks on a surreal gender-blurring ride in Luis Ortega’s bumpy but stylish, colourful, enjoyably goofy comedy thriller ‘Kill The Jockey’.
August 30, 2024
Deborah Young
The life, politics, music and relationship of cultural idols and revolutionary artists John Lennon and Yoko Ono are brilliantly blasted onscreen amid exploding shards of 1970’s Americana in Kevin Macdonald’s and Sam Rice-Edwards’ irresistibly original and high-energy documentary, ‘One to One: John & Yoko’.
August 29, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Brazilian director Petra Costa explores how religious faith can become a dangerous political weapon in ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’, the gripping sequel to her Oscar-nominated ‘The Edge of Democracy’.
August 29, 2024
Stephen Dalton
French writer-director Aude Léa Rapin’s dystopian cyber-thriller ‘Planet B’ is an ambitious but muddled mix of virtual reality and timely political issues.
August 29, 2024
Kevin Jagernauth
TIFF’s slate of European cinema ranges from provocative documentaries to pulse-pounding genre thrills.
August 23, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Sarajevo Film Festival’s 30th edition was a starry affair, balancing stories from the Balkan region’s dark past with signposts to a brighter future.
August 23, 2024
TFV Staff
The Romanian ‘Three Kilometers to the End of the World’ by director Emanuel Pârvu took home the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Feature Film.
August 22, 2024
Carmen Gray
Fresh from awards in Locarno, Georgian director Tato Kotetishvili spoke about integrating reality and trusting in magic with debut feature Holy Electricity.
August 21, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Santa Claus is not coming to town in Emir Kapetanovic’s bittersweet comic road movie ‘When Santa Was a Communist’, which is based on an absurd true story in the Balkan region’s ongoing culture wars.
August 21, 2024
Carmen Gray
Beloved American actor John Turturro spoke of depicting eccentrics, early typecasting, and the realities of mental health care to a rapt masterclass audience in Sarajevo.
August 20, 2024
Stephen Dalton
The Oscar-winning director of ‘Sideways’, ‘About Schmidt’, ‘Nebraska’ and ‘The Holdovers’ came to Sarajevo Film Festival for a masterclass talk and gala screening.
August 18, 2024
Stephen Dalton
The Oscar-winning writer-director of ‘American Fiction’ gave a lively masterclass and hosted a gala screening as part of the Balkan-region film fest’s 30th anniversary edition.
August 18, 2024
Stephen Dalton
A lively documentary from Greek director Fil Ieropoulos, ‘Avant-Drag!’ salutes the radical roots and ongoing bravery of queer performers who defy gender norms, especially in more conservative societies.
August 18, 2024
Max Borg
Marco Tullio Giordana deals solidly with family drama and music in Locarno premiere ‘The Life Apart’.
August 17, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Slovenian writer-director Sonja Prosenc explores the tragicomic extremes of wealth and privilege in her sprawling but impressive social satire ‘Family Therapy’.
August 17, 2024
Stephen Dalton
A young woman learns some bittersweet life lessons about love and family in Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic’s latest sunny but slight glum-com ‘My Late Summer’.
August 16, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Finding universal emotion in a singular case study, director Maja Novakovic’s painterly debut feature ‘At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking’ is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on loss and loneliness.
August 16, 2024
Carmen Gray
One last memory of a Yugoslavia that no longer exists becomes a site of obsessive return in Iva Radivojevic’s elegantly narrated reconstruction.
August 14, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
In the impressive ‘Listen to the Voices’, Maxime Jean-Baptiste presents a sobering look at trauma, blackness, and violence in a Guianese neighbourhood.
August 12, 2024
Lucy Virgen
‘Mexico 86’, the sober, sincere second feature from 2019 Camera D’Or winner César Díaz, lacks the passion to be a compelling political narrative.
August 11, 2024
Max Borg
Freddy Macdonald delivers Alpine thrills with his feature debut ‘Sew Torn’, part of Locarno’s Piazza Grande selection.
August 10, 2024
Carmen Gray
Ramon Zürcher’s utterly distinctive talent for twisting the domestic into the uncanny gains intensity in a cutting psychological horror as thrilling as it is elliptical and dark.
August 9, 2024
Carmen Gray
Taboo histories of violence against women in Ireland are excavated in Aislinn Clarke’s chilling, over-the-top Irish-language folk horror.
August 8, 2024
Lucy Virgen
Mar Coll returns to the Locarno Festival to explore the limits of modern motherhood in Mothers Don’t (Salve María), an intimate and empathetic film.
